Chapter Eight
Reform and Revolution in American and South African Freedom Struggles
Different though they may be in other ways, the histories of the United States and South Africa have been similar in one notable respect. To an extent unique in the modern world, these societies generated patterns of racial domination that culminated by the twentieth century in national or regional policies requiring the forced segregation of people designated as black or African. Consequently, historians and social scientists have compared these two racial orders with useful results.[1]
See George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); Idem, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery. Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, Conn., 1988), 216-269; John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, U.K., 1982); and Stanley B. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (New Haven, Conn., 1980).
But the work published in the 1980s on white supremacy in the two societies had one significant limitation: it focused almost exclusively on the thought and action of the oppressors. Left out of the comparison or treated in cursory fashion was the resistance of Africans and African Americans to white hegemony. In the introduction to my own book, White Supremacy, I acknowledged this limitation and called for work that would look at black-white relations in the two societies from the subaltern side of the color line.[2]Fredrickson, White Supremacy, xx.
Eventually I decided to take up my own challenge, and the full results have recently appeared in a book that offers a detailed treatment of a series of comparable phases of black ideological development over a period of about 150 years.[3]Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (New York, 1995).
The research for that book obviously informs this essay, but here I explore a set of recurring themes that are embedded but not concisely articulated in the larger study.Like the book, this essay is based on the assumption that the organized and programmatic black opposition to white supremacy in the
United States and in South Africa can be compared in ways that will contribute to our understanding of both "freedom struggles." Despite the important differences in the background and circumstances of black people in the United States and South Africa, leaders of the resistance against racial oppression have embraced similar ideologies and engaged in comparable debates over ultimate objectives and strategies for achieving them. This discursive affinity derives for the most part from the analogous forms of racial oppression in both societies and has been nurtured to a significant extent by mutual awareness and cross-fertilization.
Similar ideological debates and divisions have arisen on two crucial issues. The first concerns future relations with whites. Is liberation to come through equal citizenship in a multiracial polity, or is the proper aim of the struggle the achievement of some form of independent nationhood? One answer draws on universalist standards of justice and human rights to reject a racially circumscribed political destiny; the other emphasizes racial or ethnic particularism and asserts that blacks cannot achieve self-realization by joining with whites in a unitary state. For convenience, I will label the two perspectives cosmopolitan and ethnocentric . The second dichotomy, which is not automatically resolved by adopting a cosmopolitan or an ethnocentric orientation, concerns the nature of the struggle: will it be carried on by reformist or revolutionary methods?
Cosmopolitans might believe that all people can be incorporated as equals into a common society through gradual elimination of the racist aspects of an otherwise acceptable political and social order. Or they might believe that racism is an integral part of the social and economic system and that the only way to eliminate it is to overthrow the system itself. Ethnic nationalists can also be reformist or revolutionary: they can either hope to gain their autonomy through peaceful negotiation or conclude that they must seize it by force of arms.
Using these dichotomies to analyze American and South African freedom struggles reveals some striking similarities. The most obvious is the predominance of cosmopolitan perspectives in the programs and ideologies of the most durable and historically influential black movements and associations. The principal American civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has rarely wavered from the commitment to a racially integrated republic that it proclaimed at its founding in 1909. The more militant organizations that assaulted southern segregation in the late 1950s and
early 1960s—The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—all aimed, during this period at least, at removing the barriers to equal participation in a common society. Similarly, the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, has consistently advocated a multiracial or nonracial South Africa, in which opportunity and citizenship would no longer depend on skin color and ancestry. Like the American civil rights organizations, it has normally welcomed white support and participation in the struggle against segregation. It has also avoided the strong temptation, obviously absent in the American case, to conceive of the future postapartheid nation as an exclusive expression of black or African ethnicity. As the Freedom Charter of 1955 proclaimed, "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white."[4]
Thomas Karis and Gail M. Gerhart, Challenge and Violence, vol. 3 of From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, ed. Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M. Carter (Stanford, Calif., 1977), 205.
These cosmopolitan or nonracial attitudes did not go unchallenged in either country. The most obvious characteristic of the oppressors was their pigmentation. Fraternity with conquerors or former slave-owners was hard for many black people to imagine, and it was often psychologically easier to hate whites and to wish to be rid of them than to distinguish between the sinners and their sins. The fact that black-white relations did not become the kind of zero-sum struggle-to-the-death between competing racial or ethnic groups that has developed in other parts of the world may seem miraculous given the flagrantly unjust treatment of blacks in the United States and South Africa. This achievement of mainstream black leaders was, and continues to be, a fragile one that has been under constant challenge from a variety of nationalist or separatist movements.
In the United States, a persistent undercurrent of separatist nationalism has ebbed and flowed since the early-to-mid nineteenth century, mainly in the form of African emigration movements. At times, this impulse has also taken the form of demands for territorial separation to establish the basis for a black nation within the existing boundaries of the United States. Major twentieth-century manifestations of the search for ethnic self-determination have included such notable mass movements as Marcus Garvey's Africa-oriented Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1920s and the Nation of Islam—the so-called Black Muslims, who came to prominence in the 1950s and have retained substantial support up to the present day. For Garvey, the only way black Americans could liberate themselves from racism was to participate in the creation of an independent Africa. He saw no
long-term future for blacks in the United States because he viewed white racism as ineradicable. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Muslims, the Republic of New Africa, and other separatist groups called for the creation of a sovereign black nation within the current borders of the United States.[5]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chaps. 2, 4, 7 for surveys of the history of black separatism in the United States and references to the principal secondary sources on this ideological tradition.
At the present time black nationalist sentiment appears to be reviving within an African American community that is suffering from an intensification of white hostility and discrimination. But, up to now, this feeling has expressed itself mainly in the form of cultural separation within the American educational system and has not produced a definite plan or program for political independence from a white-dominated America.In South Africa the ANC's multiracial or nonracial ideology has been continually challenged from within the organization as well as from outside by groups or movements usually designated as "Africanist." The Africanist perspective derives ultimately from the natural desire of conquered people to regain their land and was first articulated in the slogan "Africa for the Africans," which was associated with the rise of an independent black Christianity around the turn of the century. It was later expressed in a variety of messianic movements of the 1920s, some of them influenced by Garveyism, which heralded a racial apocalypse in which some supernatural power, or, alternatively, black American aviators flying bombing planes, would exterminate all of the whites or drive them into the sea.[6]
See ibid., chaps. 2 and 4; J. Mutero Chirinje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge, 1987); Robert Edgar, "Garveyism in Africa: Dr. Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei," Ufahumu 6 (1) (1976), 31-57.
A more secular and sophisticated version of Africanism emerged within the ANC during the period after World War II, partially in response to the Pan-Africanist ideology of independence movements elsewhere on the continent. The ANC Youth League of the mid-to-late 1940s, in which Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu began their political careers, had a pronounced Africanist orientation in its early years. But in 1948 it explicitly repudiated the Garveyite slogan of "Africa for the Africans," indicating that African ascendancy would not mean exclusion or expulsion of whites from a liberated South Africa.[7]
Thomas Karis, Hope and Challenge, vol. 2 of From Protest to Challenge, ed. Karis and Carter (Stanford, 1973), 328.
After the ANC reaffirmed its multiracial vision of South Africa's future in the Freedom Charter of 1955, the minority that favored a nationalism based on consciousness of racial character and destiny seceded to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959. The Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s retained some elements of the Pan-Africanist perspective, and in the 1990s the Africanist or ethnic nationalist strain of black liberationist thought survives in modified form (synthesized to some extent with Marxian class perspectives)in the PAC, the Azanian People's Organization, and allied groups.[8]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 7; Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley, 1978); Robert M. Fatton, Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (Albany, 1986); and N. Barney Pityana et al., The Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement (Cape Town, 1991).
Given their appeal to deep-seated popular emotions, it may seem remarkable that racially defined nationalisms have thus far failed to predominate in the politics of black protest and resistance in either country. This failure is especially remarkable in the case of South Africa. In the United States, the legacy of slavery, emancipation achieved with white allies, and the egalitarian amendments to the constitution passed during the Reconstruction era served to distance many black Americans from their African roots and raise enduring hopes for equality within a democratized republic. But some black South African nations lost their independence a little more than a century ago under conditions that permitted them to retain a sense of national or tribal identity. The continued if diminishing vitality of traditional African cultures and the intensification of white oppression and discrimination after 1910 might have been expected to undermine hopes for a common society based on racial equality and cooperation. One reason this did not happen is that universalist, cosmopolitan ideologies—especially Christian humanitarianism and Marxism—have exerted such a powerful influence on African elites.
During the early stages of twentieth-century black protest politics in both countries, the predominant ideology was a color-blind, cosmopolitan liberalism inherited from the nineteenth century. In the American context this was the tradition of Frederick Douglass and the interracial abolitionist and Radical Republican movements. In South Africa it was the legacy of "Cape liberalism"—the notion of "equal rights for every civilized man regardless of race or color" that had been proclaimed, often somewhat hypocritically, by white English-speaking "friends of the natives" in the Cape Colony in the decades just before the unification of South Africa in 1910. In the minds of many twentieth-century black leaders, most of whom were educated by white missionaries, this universalist liberalism was linked with Christianity and its ideal of human brotherhood. Normally, however, Christian liberalism is not a revolutionary creed. For the most part the ideologies that dominated black protest movements in South Africa until the 1950s and in the United States until the mid-1960s advocated incremental racial reformism rather than sudden and fundamental changes in the social and economic system.
The first serious efforts to redefine the black struggle in terms of a revolutionary cosmopolitanism came after the Russian Revolution
when Communists in both societies confronted the race issue and sought to mobilize blacks in the cause of proletarian revolution. The Communist campaign to overthrow capitalism in the United States and South Africa went through three similar stages. Initially the emphasis was on enrolling class-conscious white workers, even if this meant tactical concessions to their feelings of racial superiority and fears of economic competition with blacks willing to work for lower wages. (In 1922, the South African party, to support a strike against the displacement of white miners by lower-paid Africans, actually endorsed the slogan "Workers of the world unite for a white South Africa.") When a class appeal directed at whites failed to achieve mass support, Communists shifted some of their attention to blacks, basing their appeal on antiracism and calls for the solidarity of black and white workers. Finally, in 1928 the Comintern examined closely "the Negro question" in both the United States and South Africa and determined that a program based strictly on class would not be effective in attracting mass black support. Impressed by the popularity of the Garvey movement, the Comintern embraced the cause of black nationalism, calling for "a native republic" in South Africa and national self-determination for the Black Belt of the southern United States.[9]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 5, for a full discussion of these and subsequent efforts of Communists to put themselves in the forefront of black liberation struggles in the United States and South Africa. The notes for this chapter contain references to the major secondary sources on blacks and Communism in the two societies during the period between the mid twenties and the late forties.
This controversial redefinition did not involve accepting an essentialist view of race and cannot be attributed entirely to tactical cynicism. The new policy was rooted in the Leninist doctrine of attacking capitalism by encouraging national struggles against imperial domination, which required mobilization of the peasantry as a revolutionary force. In the late 1920s the majority of Africans and African Americans were still trapped in rural poverty and could plausibly be described as peasants whose subjugation and exploitation followed a color line and were rationalized in terms or race or ethnicity. Communists believed that these pre-proletarian victims of capitalism could most readily be aroused to insurrectionary action if the party promulgated a conception of liberation that appealed to their repressed desires for national or ethnic self-determination.
As a device for winning support among American blacks, the slogan had a very limited success. Robin Kelley has shown that a practical application of the slogan to the condition of southern sharecroppers, in the form of a demand that blacks be given ownership of the land they worked, had great resonance among a people who believed that they had once been promised some of the land that they had cultivated as slaves. The substantial if ephemeral success of the Communist-dominated
Alabama Sharecroppers Union was based in part on an interpretation of "Negro self-determination" that was congruent with the folk traditions of those being organized.[10]
See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).
But the slogan was applicable only to the rural South and thus could not serve as an effective means to coopt the ghetto nationalism expressed in the Garvey movement. In northern urban areas Communists persisted in their efforts to encourage interracial solidarity among industrial and commercial workers and in the early thirties withheld their support from the "don't buy where you can't work" campaigns of black activists because they considered them incompatible with a continued emphasis on interracial class solidarity. While occasionally giving lip service to the aim of "self-determination for the Black Belt," most American Communists in the 1930s concentrated on the economic or class issues brought to the fore by the Great Depression. The slogan virtually disappeared from Communist propaganda directed at African Americans after 1934 when a change in the international party line deemphasized anti-imperialist revolutions. Between 1934 and 1939 the highest priority of the Soviet Union was to encourage within Western democratic nations a united front of antifascist elements, which came to include not only white social democrats but also bourgeois "progressives."Communist appeals to nationalism in South Africa during the late twenties and thirties were also intermittent and of limited impact, despite their apparent compatibility with the situation of Africans as a colonized people. In the late 1920s, after having been expelled from the Industrial and Commercial Worker's Union (ICU)—an important independent association of black workers and peasants—Communists made their first serious effort to gain influence within the African National Congress. They succeeded in winning the cooperation of ANC president J. T. Gumede, who became sympathetic to Communism after a visit to the Soviet Union. But Gumede was ousted from the ANC leadership in 1930 by a conservative faction and the organization entered a nonmilitant accommodationist phase that lasted until the end of the decade. Torn by purges, factional conflict, and confusion about how to apply the "black republic" slogan, the South African Communist party also went into eclipse and did not revive until the Second World War. Free from significant left-wing influence, the mainstream black organizations—the ANC and the All-African Convention of the mid thirties—limited themselves to protesting against new legislative assaults on African rights, hoping in vain to reverse the tide of racial segregation and discrimination through peaceful and legal forms of protest.
The perspective of the American Communist party and of others who took a Marxist or socialist view of the racial question reached its high point of influence among African Americans in the mid-to-late 1930s. Helped by the economic desperation of blacks and whites alike during the Great Depression, hopes of cooperation between black and white workers revived among leftists and also influenced a broad spectrum of black leaders and intellectuals. But the party's favorable image in the black community stemmed primarily from its endorsement of traditional civil rights objectives and its essentially reformist stance during the Popular Front era. Instead of trying to convert large numbers of blacks to a revolutionary ideology, Communists curried favor by accommodating themselves in the short run to the dominant tradition of cosmopolitan reformism.
World War II and the Cold War brought a striking reversal of the situation of the radical left in both countries. In the United States, Marxists lost influence among blacks, and Communists were relegated to the periphery of an intensifying black civil rights struggle. In South Africa, Communists became major participants in the struggle for black liberation, forging a working alliance with the African National Congress that has proved remarkably durable. In the period between 1940 and 1960 reformism became more dominant than ever in the American movement; simultaneously an overtly revolutionary ideology was becoming increasingly influential in the South African struggle.
The decline of radical, potentially revolutionary, influences on American racial movements stemmed in part from Communist blunders and miscalculations during the war years, which made the party seem less militant and committed to black equality than thoroughly reformist groups like the NAACP and the March on Washington movement (at least until 1944 when the Soviet Union was no longer in danger, and it again became acceptable in party circles to agitate militantly against Jim Crow). After the war, the McCarthyite hysteria affected mainstream black movements and induced them to keep Communists at arm's length. At the same time, reformism was beginning to pay off in favorable court decisions against the segregation and disfranchisement of southern blacks and in growing black influence on the national Democratic party. Once the repressive McCarthyite phase of the late 1940s and early 1950s had run its course, the Cold War actually encouraged gains in civil rights because policymaking elites became aware that America's practice of racial discrimination impeded the propaganda
struggle for the "hearts and minds" of people of color in Africa and Asia.
In South Africa the triumph of the Nationalist party in 1948 led to the extension and intensification of racial segregation under the banner of apartheid; consequently the futility of reformism became increasingly evident. In 1949 a younger generation, influenced by Africanism as well as Marxism, came to power in the ANC and launched a campaign of militant nonviolent resistance against the apartheid regime. The example of independence movements elsewhere in Africa encouraged aspirations for a nationalist revolution in South Africa. In the 1950s the ethnocentric or Africanist impulse was marginalized, partly as a result of Communist influence. The basis for cooperation between the ANC and the CP was set forth by Moses Kotane, a black Communist who was also an ANC leader. According to this doctrine, the South African revolution would be a two-stage affair, first a struggle for national self-determination to achieve democratic majority rule, and then a freely chosen transformation to socialism. Even if the majority of the ANC did not endorse the second revolution or was uncertain about it, there was no justification for refusing Communist assistance in achieving the primary objective, especially since the ANC's great tradition was cooperation with sympathetic whites, and most of the whites who fully endorsed racial equality and "one person, one vote" in South Africa during the immediate postwar period were Communists or fellow-traveling radicals. Making common cause with Communists made sense to staunch opponents of the South African regime at a time when the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, was strongly supportive of the struggle against apartheid. When nonviolent acts of civil disobedience were shown to be suicidal at Sharpeville in 1960 and both the ANC and PAC were forced underground, the National Congress's reluctant acceptance of violent resistance took the form of establishing, jointly with the Communist party, a military organization committed to sabotage and ultimately to guerrilla warfare. The turn to revolutionary cosmopolitanism seemed irrevocable. The ANC's slogan of the 1980s—Apartheid cannot be reformed"—was taken to mean that it must be overthrown.[11]
See Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 6. The fullest account of black political thought and action during the postwar era is Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa since 1945 (London, 1983).
As American and South African freedom struggles diverged, it began to seem more and more obvious that the situations in the two countries were radically different. A black majority can hope to make a revolution by itself, but a black minority can scarcely expect to do so. Furthermore the United States Constitution encouraged hopes for equal
citizenship, whereas South Africa's constitutional and legal framework was unequivocally white supremacist and would have to be completely reconstituted if blacks were to have any semblance of equal rights. But what has occurred in black thinking and consciousness since the 1960s shows that revolutionary attitudes could reemerge in the American context and that reformist tactics could again seem relevant or necessary in the South African.
The more militant and confrontational American civil rights movement of the early 1960s was often described at the time as a "nonviolent revolution" or as "the Negro revolution." In a special sense, the term is entirely appropriate. The movement used disruptive and coercive methods—sit-ins, boycotts, mass marches, and demonstrations—that violated state and local laws and went beyond normal American limits on peaceful dissent and reformist agitation. If these methods were nonviolent, they were likely to provoke violence and were to some extent intended to do so; although, as Adam Fairclough has shown, careful planning helped to minimize the bloodshed.[12]
Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., (Athens, Ga., 1987), 7-8 and passim.
Furthermore, civil rights activists rejected gradualism, insisting on "Freedom, Now." Within the context of a southern social order based on legalized racism, the movement was indeed revolutionary in its intentions and achievements.Within a national context, however, its reformist characteristics were apparent. Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting constitutional provisions for equal rights gave the movement legitimacy and put the onus of law-breaking on the southern segregationists. In 1964 and 1965 the U. S. Congress enacted most of the program of southern protesters, reflecting a decision of national elites to remove the embarrassing anomaly of legalized segregation and denial of voting rights in one section of the country. In bringing southern racial practices into harmony with the rest of the country, national legislators and policymakers were promoting the health and safety of the American social and economic system as a whole. The civil rights legislation can therefore be viewed as the culmination of a successful reform movement, one that strengthened and legitimized fundamental social and economic arrangements rather than calling them into question and inciting radical resistance to the status quo.
Nevertheless, the legislative success of the civil rights movement failed to pacify African Americans; indeed its aftermath was the most devastating and bloody wave of urban disorders in American history—the ghetto insurrections of 1965–1968. The failure of civil rights reform
to address the economic disadvantages under which most blacks labored and its inability to meet the rising expectations of a better life that the movement's rhetoric had called forth, encouraged a bitter and rebellious mood in the black urban communities of the North and West. The result was the upsurge of revolutionary rhetoric associated with the slogan "Black Power." But the rhetoric did not easily crystallize into effective political ideology, because it was hard to imagine how a black revolution could actually take place within a nation that was mostly white. The most plausible formulation was probably that of the Black Panther party, which eventually went beyond a strictly black nationalist viewpoint and envisioned an American dispossessed class, composed mainly but not exclusively of dark-skinned victims of racism, acting in support of the struggle of third-world peoples against Western imperialism.[13]
For a full discussion of the evolution of Black Power ideology, see Fredrickson, Black Liberation, chap. 7, and John T. McCartney, Black Power Ideologies: An Essay in African-American Political Thought (Philadelphia, 1992).
By itself the Black Power slogan had limited revolutionary potential, despite its capacity to stimulate localized disorders, because it so readily lent itself to essentially reformist purposes. It normally meant rejection of nonviolent tactics but only to the extent that self-defense was sanctioned. Its call for racial mobilization could, and often did, mean merely the organization of black voters into an ethnic bloc and the encouragement of black capitalist enterprise. As Stokely Carmichael and others explicitly proclaimed, Black Power was in the American tradition of ethnic mobilization for political and economic advantage, as pioneered by the Irish, the Jews, and other white ethnic minorities.[14]
See Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York, 1967), 44-56.
From this perspective Black Power was not so much a radical and revolutionary separatism as a tough-minded and somewhat cynical program for group incorporation into a society that was conceived as culturally pluralist rather than homogeneous and as more responsive to physical power than to assertions of democratic values. In its most common applications Black Power turned out to be an ethnocentric reformism, which departed from the cosmopolitan reformism of the civil rights movement in its stress on racial identity and integrity rather than in its social and economic radicalism. In fact Martin Luther King, Jr., during the last years of his life, was more consistently radical on social and economic questions than many Black Power advocates.[15]On King's embrace of social radicalism, see especially David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, 1986), 527-624.
The South African Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s borrowed some of its rhetoric from the American Black Power movement. There was a similar emphasis on psychological and organizational independence from liberal or even radical whites. But, as Steve Biko made clear in an explicit comparison of the two movements, there
was a great difference between a minority movement aimed at incorporation on its own terms and a majority movement seeking to gain control of its own country.[16]
Steve Biko, Black Consciousness in South Africa, ed. Arnold Mallard (New York, 1978), 98.
Although repression prevented the Black Consciousness Movement from openly avowing its revolutionary aims (at times it explicitly denied them), it was clear to everyone who thought much about it, including the South African government, that BC could not achieve its aims except by a nationalist revolution. By broadening the conception of "black" to include Indians and "Coloreds," it transcended the Africanist tradition, but its rejection of whites put it in obvious conflict with the ANC's nonracial cosmopolitanism.[17]See Gerhart, Black Power, 257-299.
After the Soweto uprising of 1976, which was inspired in part by the Black Consciousness Movement, some commentators predicted that the ANC's nonracialism would soon cease to dominate the antiapartheid movement and that a racially defined nationalism would come to the fore in the black struggle. But during the 1980s the mainstream domestic movement, represented principally by the United Democratic Front (UDF), proclaimed its allegiance to the cosmopolitan Freedom Charter and opened its ranks to white supporters, thus relegating groups with an exclusivist Black Consciousness orientation, like the Azanian People's Organization, to the periphery of the struggle. Now linked to a vigorous internal movement, the ANC gained in international prestige and recognition, utterly eclipsing the PAC, the other exile organization. In the mid-eighties the increasing level of violent and nonviolent resistance to the regime and the government's desperate and draconian efforts to repress the antiapartheid movement made it seem more likely than ever that South Africa was in a classic revolutionary situation. However long it might take, it seemed inevitable that white tyranny would be overthrown; it also seemed clear that it would have to be overthrown by revolutionary action, because the government gave no signs of a willingness to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power to the black majority.[18]
A good account of South African developments in the 1980s is contained in Anthony Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition to Apartheid, 1960-1990 (New York, 1992).
The surprising turn of events in 1989–1990—the emergence of nonviolent mass resistance against segregation laws for the first time since 1960; the unprecedented success of this movement in gaining the right to protest and in pressuring the government to phase out petty apartheid; the dramatic release of Nelson Mandela; the beginning of discussions between the government and the ANC; and the subsequent negotiations that have led to a new constitution, democratic elections, and the presidency of Nelson Mandela—have called into question the
conventional wisdom on the inevitability of a South African revolution. Many observers of the late 1980s had described the situation as a stalemate or impasse—the African resistance lacked the power to overthrow the regime, but the government lacked the ability to suppress the level of black opposition to a point where it could feel secure. Furthermore, the economy, seriously damaged by international sanctions that were intensified by the domestic upheaval and repression of the 1980s, was in such bad shape that it threatened to undermine white expectations of prosperity under apartheid.[19]
For a discussion of the expert opinion of the late 1980s, see George M. Fredrickson, "Can South Africa Change?," New York Review of Books, 26 October 1989, 48-56.
What these observers had for the most part failed to anticipate was that this impasse would prove so unsatisfactory for both sides that they would jointly seek a negotiated settlement rather than risk a long, uncertain, and debilitating struggle for the unconditional surrender of their opponents. In opting for negotiations, the ANC realized that it could not achieve all its objectives in the near future. The white minority did not surrender unconditionally, because it had no necessity or incentive to do so. Hence it is not surprising that the ANC accepted some compromises, agreeing to an interim arrangement that fell short of achieving its professed goal of untrammeled black majority rule in a unitary state. Mandela and the leadership of the ANC concluded that a compromise constitutional settlement, involving some checks and balances to protect the white minority's economic and social privileges, would open the way to the eventual achievement of a substantive form of black majority rule. But the entrenchment of market capitalism and the recognition of most existing white property rights was the price that had to be paid to open up the political system to Africans by some means short of actually driving the whites from power after a prolonged and bloody revolutionary struggle.
Major reform, with revolutionary implications for the racial status order but not for the character of other social and economic relationships, is one way to describe what has taken place in South Africa during the last seven years. As in the American South, however, that reform was forced from below by militant confrontational tactics rather than imposed from above in an effort to head off trouble that had not yet reached crisis proportions. In such cases the maintenance of a sharp dichotomy between reform and revolution becomes problematic. Clearly the analogy with what happened in the United States during the 1960s is not so far-fetched as many, including myself, thought it would be in the 1980s. In both countries, it now appears, the cause of black liberation has entered a new phase. The current challenge is
how to go beyond an effective mobilization against legalized segregation and denial of voting rights to mount a successful political challenge to the de facto inequality of white and black circumstances in the two societies—a gap that in the United States, by some measures, is actually increasing. A new synthesis of reformist and revolutionary methods or perspectives will be required to move the two freedom struggles to a higher stage.